


Parallax

by luxraydyne



Category: AI: The Somnium Files (Video Game)
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, M/M, i haven't written actual fanfic in ten years but of course the zero escape man finally got me, no beta we die like men, the M rating is to be on the safe side there's nothing super wild but some pretty graphic imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-21 03:55:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30015762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luxraydyne/pseuds/luxraydyne
Summary: It's Friday, when Pewter wakes up in the early hours of the morning.Does this count as a fix-it AU? I mean, the game can't just casually bring up parallel universes like that and expect me NOT to go buck wild. I'm about two years late to this party, but if Uchikoshi ain't gonna give the space gay and sad dad a better ending, well, I'll do it myself. #freePewter2k21
Relationships: Okiura Renju/Pewter | Amanoma Futa
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Parallax

# Parallax

Pewter prises his eyes open to find Renju awake, at the foot of the bed. His face and rather bedraggled fair hair are illuminated in a pool of white light. One hand rests in his lap, and the other tugs at the top button of his shirt.

“You all right? It’s…” Pewter turns his head to glance at the faint glow of the digital clock, reading 04:28. “…early.”

“I got a NILE message, that’s all. It’s fine. Go back to sleep, Futa.”

Perhaps on a different night he would have. Such untimely awakenings were not uncommon. A night in this room, in this apartment was, almost without fail, a night of rubbing crust and LED glare out of his eyes to the rapid tapping of fingernails against a keyboard. The fickle whims of Lemniscate came as part of the package. Pewter’s REM cycle had never quite adapted to the constant interruptions, but it would take a hell of a lot more than that to stop him. On a different night, he would lean forward to give Ren’s hand a gentle squeeze, mutter something about remembering to rest, and then roll over. Not tonight, though. Not when he bent over his phone like a landslide pushed against his shoulder blades, pinching the crease of his brow above his glasses. He sits upright, vision blurring a little with the abrupt movement, and throws the sheet aside, shuffling a few inches closer.

“What about?”

He ducks his head, determined not to lose sight of his eyes, even when Ren tries to slide his gaze away.

“It’s Shoko, if you can believe it. She needs to see me today. Naturally, I’ve spent the last fifteen minutes agonising over how to respond.”

Pewter had intended to reassure him. In fact, he is halfway through formulating a good, kind thought, preparing to offer it in that soft voice of a supportive partner, the best he could muster in the early hours. Instead, what bursts out of him came from a place outside of his brain, lower, more bodily, like a hiccup.

“Where?”

Renju swallows, curling his chin even closer to his chest. “Someplace in Kabasaki.”

“No.”

“What?”

“I said, no.”

Pewter is an intelligent man. He knows this. And yet his vocabulary seems to consist of nothing but those three words. He stands up. Perhaps gravity might wash some of the blood from his head and return some sensation to his legs. It doesn’t work, and he sits again, on the edge of the mattress. He feels like he has spent minutes sifting through his skull with this pounding ache in his chest. And after all of the effort, all he can conjure is a childlike parroting, with an added, painful snap of condescension that pinches even at his own core, as his voice rolls off of his tongue.

“Shoko wants to _meet_ with you? Today, in _Kabasaki_?”

“You're shouting. What's the matter?” Renju finally looks at him, pupils darting side-to-side across his face, mouth hanging open slightly, in a downward curve. He leans back, like a fox flinching away at the crack of gunfire. “Do you know something about this?” he murmurs.

“No. I don't--”

He doesn’t, of course. In all the time they had been seeing each other, Shoko had never done such a thing. He is almost inclined not to believe the message existed. Only, Renju wouldn't lie about something like this. They don't lie to each other, not about this. It was never a spoken, acknowledged rule. More like a mutual understanding, agreed upon in the silence after a flood of too many words spilling like bile, the taste just as thick and salty in the mouth, while the other gathered tears in his hands and offered his body for a shield, or at least a velvety blanket against the world. Sometimes, he thought, they seemed to cry as much as they laughed. The double-edged sword of copious doses of alcohol.

He does know something. Doesn't he? He knows that those lines, _“Shoko needs to see me,”_ had yanked him from the lull of sleep. He knew the feeling of his organs rising rapidly up through his body, the taste of acid at the back of his throat. He had never been one for dreaming much, perhaps ironically. It was no passing memory, nor a flutter of epiphany that he had experienced. It was images overlaying atop each other like lens filters, grappling for space, voices, some muttering into their hands, others screaming, loud enough to break his eardrums from the inside. There was a white horse, splatters of blood on the walls, glints of metal. So much blood, everywhere, all over his hands, in his eyes. Water laps against the harbour wall, and washes away red. A corpse. Tire tracks. Deep, black holes. In space? _“Have you ever seen a dead body?”_ No. It's his corpse. It's Ren. He must have been like that for some time now, they say. He's so cold tiny crystals of ice form on his cheeks. And all anyone can fucking talk about is his shit on the floorboards. He is grey now, his skin. The water pulls him away. His body wants to fall to its knees, on its own, to pull off his gloves and throw his knuckles against the concrete until they bleed, no prompting, like a rehearsed motion.

“No,” he says again. “But just think, for a second.”

“I am thinking! What do you suppose I'm trying to do? What would you have me do instead?”

For what is he if not a fool trying to make things better, to clutch the damage close to himself? He is an evil man, by any logic, but not quite evil enough to hate the woman who had once been his wife. She seemed the sort of being who could never be outwitted, deceived, against whom no human could win. And yet, whenever he tilted his eyes upward to the figure of Saint Sebastian, reminded himself of the first night (morning?) he had planted a breathless, bourbon-tinged kiss on this man's lips—he practically had to leap up on his toes to manage it—he felt the weight of a betrayal. Even when she hurled poison through a phone call to the sound of a child stifling tears, even when his daughter sat quietly in the passenger seat of his car, fingertips worrying a new red blotch on the back of her hand, even then, he wanted to forgive her. He had to forgive her, somehow, if he were ever to be forgiven himself. Of course the message is suspicious. He is certainly stupid, but not ignorant. Her clipped phrasing made the issue sound urgent, and yet he is expected to show up on appointment. And two people who could barely look each other in the face didn’t meet in a dingy corner of Kabasaki to make amends, that's for sure. But so what? The light from his phone’s screen casts dim shadows on the floor, which ripple, mould themselves into clawed hands and grab at his ankles. So he might turn up to find Shoko and the Kumakura’s have some nefarious plan for him. They might execute him on the spot. Hell, a knife might appear from an alley and stab him in the gut before he even makes it to the old chemical plant. The alternative…

He pushes away from Pewter, scrambling toward the door with some deep, animal sound, almost a growl, before hesitating, seeming to recall he still has a nearly a whole day to wait and is only half-dressed. He turns to the ceiling, a smooth, unmoving, unsympathetic face, and twists his hands into his hair.

“What if something’s happened to Mizuki? What then?”

He would do anything. Pewter is a man of science, of reason, by trade. He understands how the physics of this world operates and how it doesn't. And he would break it for him. He would tear this rotten world to shreds if it could fix it, make it right, make it Renju’s. He dared another version of himself to rip through the fabric of space, snatch his man away and love him better than this.

“Do you trust Date so little? Do you trust your daughter so little, for that matter? Stop for a moment. Sit. Breathe. Read it again.”

He does sit, at least. This is progress. He pushes his glasses onto his head, hides behind his hands, pressing his fingers into the corners of his eyes. He sucks air in through his nose, and Pewter places a hand on his back, to remind him how his body works, that the trapped breath has to be let out again.

“I'm trying. I'm trying to be better. Why can't I do this?”

“You can. You are. The very fact of you asking me, that means you are.”

“I’m beginning to think that doesn’t even matter.”

“Of course it matters. Of course it does. There are people who know that, who care so much, Ren.” Believe me, his body says, arms wrapping around his lover and pulling him back. He wants Ren to feel his heart, trying to break out of his ribcage. Believe me. He presses his lips to his temple. His hair smells sweet, lavender and something else. Pewter could never decide on the rest. Renju liked to pretend to remember. The slope of his nose turns cool and damp. He would not lift a hand to wipe any tears out of sight. That would mean letting go, would mean the risk of letting something dark and violent in. Ren’s jagged shoulder bores uncomfortably into his collarbone.

Pewter’s form suddenly seems both conspicuously large, too long in the limbs, and miniscule, too fragile, pathetic. His voice brushes warm against Renju’s ear. He whispers, slowly, syllables catching on the backs of his teeth, as though they are smuggled behind a curtain, hiding from a face at the window.

“Choose me,” he says, “just this one time.”

One time? What does he even mean by that? It seems like an abject, dirty thought. This man, this terrible, beautiful man had tried to ward him off. He had felt it, too, the spontaneous draw, like noticing the scent of rain in the air. And then, he tried to tear himself away, thought himself too lowly, too corrupted, for him, of all people. He finally let Pewter walk him most of the way home, their third meeting, he remembers, a sideways stagger out of Marble's raised doorway betraying him. And when he could no longer resist, he had cradled his face in both of his hands, tasted him as though his tongue was made of more than cheap drink, tucked his nose under his jaw as though he smelled of flowers, not of chemicals and grease and sweat. Pewter had returned the nights after, waiting to catch him, without the fluorescent visor, so he could kiss him properly. He had breathed the same lungful of air as him, shared a bed with him. He scrawled strings of poetry on napkins for him, shielding his unfinished secret with one hand, pushing his glasses back up his nose with the other, wrinkles appearing at the corners of his eyes. It probably should have embarrassed him a little. His sense if lyricism had one, particular, saccharin flavour. But it wasn't embarrassing. It was like being handed colour, distilled and forged into glass with his name etched within it. All he could offer in return was that watch. He'd thought the gold would suit him. He slipped it over his wrist with a pink flush that reached to the tips of his ears. _“Perfect. Now we match. I might never take it off. Well, except for one person I suppose.”_ He'd kicked his shin under the restaurant table. He had seen that ring of gold tossed to the bottom of a deep well, stopped, its face shattered.

He'd kill them. If he ever found who had done that to Ren, he would kill them with a single bullet to the heart.

He says it again. "Just once, choose me. Please, Ren. Just for tonight. I'll never ask you for anything. You can blame me. I’m the one being selfish. You'll never have to see my wretched ugly face again, I swear. But...please. Choose me."

“Don’t say things like that about yourself, Futa. That’s not for you…”

Once again, the range of human language falls away from him like dominoes. Now he is left with only two.

"Choose me."

“All right…” A reply vibrates against his skin. Then it grows louder, angrier, amplifying into the buzz of the phone smothered between their knees. His head is heavy, and it drops into the crook of Ren’s neck.

“It’s Mizuki,” he says, and it is as though a valve in the walls bursts open, black water pouring down onto the street below. “She’s fine, although none too happy about my waking her.”

Renju can live with that. In this moment, his thumb hovering over the narrow blue rectangle on the screen, he feels he could live with his daughter’s ireful reply until the moment he dies.

“Here, how about this?” He untangles himself for a few seconds, reaching around Futa to place his phone, not off, of course, but face down, quiet, docile, on the bedside table.

“I’m sorry,” he adds, peering up through his eyelashes beseechingly, one hand landing on Pewter’s thigh, holding it steady. His left leg had begun bouncing, he realises, in that particular way it does when his mind is weary of restraining him. “You must be tired.”

And it is true, that he is exhausted, though not in the way that a year of sleep could remedy. The weight of it squeezes his bones and wraps his head in suffocating fog, like sand, or a plastic bag.

“I’ve given up on my four hours, if I’m being honest. Besides, with Date and Aiba breaking things in one ear, and the Boss reprimanding us all in the other, it’s not as though I’d be able to fall asleep at my desk if I wanted to.”

Renju’s countenance twitches at that, a suggestion of a smile, a sigh escaping him as air through a crack. It sounds like relief. He tucks his legs underneath him, almost kneeling, as if preparing for a lopsided prayer. His fingers trace over Futa’s cheeks, noting the guilty shimmer painted over them as his eyes adjust to the lack of both light and lenses. Those high cheekbones were one of the first things about this man he had committed to memory, ridiculous coat and astronaut’s suit aside.

He chews on his tongue for a moment, his next words bobbing in his throat. _“Honey, why won’t you just accept what’s good for you? Or should I say, who?”_ Mama had told him once—scolded, really—with a shrug of her fur jacket. Good for him, yes, but what of the other? Futa is not the selfish one. Never. It is him. He is the one asking, taking, begging, always, for just one more thing.

“Have I ever told you that I love you?”

“I know.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

“Ah, so now you are trying to outsmart me?”

“I love you. I love you so, so much,” he says, between desperate, pecking kisses to his face, then his neck. He tries to repeat himself for emphasis, though his poetic instinct rapidly breaks down, until only the odd ‘love’ makes it out as speech, splinters exhaled into the quiet.

The phone’s screen flashes awake a couple more times. Perhaps it would scream if it could, a siren in more ways than one.

 _“Not this time,”_ Pewter might have snarled aloud, if not for Ren’s lips pressed to his mouth.

He opens his eyes briefly, just to steal the sight of him, kneeling over him like a victory. A part of his brain—left or right, he cannot tell—longs to sink his teeth into him, to leave a red, angry mark. The other hesitates even to lay his palms on him, lest he begin to fracture like ice over a lake. Left settles for threading through his golden hair, and right for sliding under his creased, open collar.

_“You can’t have him. Not this time.”_

_He’s mine._

**Author's Note:**

> Conclusion: I'm still sad.  
> My point still stands Spike Chunsoft, what would I have to do to get a prequel, huh?


End file.
